Dialogical modelling processes: conversations for the social construction of scientific models in the science classroom

Abstract

Classroom dialogue is fundamental in a classroom guided by socio-constructivist views of learning due to the learning experiences teachers can provide their students through them. This descriptive and exploratory case study aims to analyse the discourse that enables teachers to facilitate students' expression of models through the study of a phenomenon in a science class. The case study presents the experiences of four secondary school chemistry teachers who implement the same teaching and learning sequence about chemical combinations. The classes were recorded, transcribed, and analysed using a qualitative research framework. The results show that teachers facilitate learning opportunities through intermittent spaces of productive classroom conversation. The analysis of these dialogical spaces lets us identify a highly distinctive dialogic process that permeates instructional modelling opportunities, which focus on four dimensions of the management of the modelling conversation: teachers' conversational directionality, the presence of non-productive classroom conversation, moments that trigger the teacher's discursive decisions and the construction of the model through instructional modelling cycles.